2017 SCI-Arc Tokyo Symposium

National Art Center Auditorium

July 16, 2017 at 1:00pm–July 16, 2017 at 5:00pm

Body ConsciousNew space and form for a distributed humanity

身体を意識する分散化するヒトの空間と形態

At the beginning of the 20th century, a new Science, a new Art and a new Architecture emerged from the confluence of new ideas, new technologies, and exposure to new cultures. Previous paradigms were shaken: Einstein’s relativity replaced Newton’s fixed laws with contingency, Picasso’s fragmentation overcame academic composition, new visual technologies challenged centuries of representation while the spatial and material innovations of Wright, Mackintosh, and Gropius provided a revolutionary alternative to 19th c. debates on style. Though their revolutionary potential was not always immediately recognized, such works drastically altered our 20th century understanding of the relationship between humankind, the body and the world.

The first decade of the 21st century has seen similar explosion of new science, new art, and new technologies. If the 20th century introduced a modern human subject as an alternative to the classically humanist one, in the 21st century we are coming to understand the distributed human subject, augmented by technologies from the nano- to the planetary scale, with agencies far broader and more complex than ever before. New social, immersive, and enhanced media have combined with ubiquitous, data-rich, and intelligent new tools to enable new ideas and design formations for this 21st century human body.

In the summer of 2017 SCI-Arc again invites to Tokyo architects and designers from around the Pacific Rim to examine the implications of the distributed human for cities, architecture and design.